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Updated 56 Days ago
The Truth About Text/Drunk Driving
ToastedRav has talked about texting before. And while it's nice to know how to decipher "idk, my bff rose," two recently published studies have presented a problem that everyone needs to think about before they start typing away on the highway.
I wasn't really surprised to find out that text messaging is now more popular than talking on the phone. I mean, no offense to my friends and loved ones, but I don't think I'm the only one who feels like it's often much easier to text a sentence or two instead of having a half-hour phone chat. The average number of text messages that we send and receive today has increased 450% since 2006. I'm not a cellular expert or anything, but that seems like a pretty significant increase.
But although our fingers are getting a good workout, the large screens on popular phones like the iPhone, Blackjack, Treo, Blackberry and others have made it possible to send a novel of a text message. The problem with that is when you're sending a novel while driving, that's a heck of a long time not to be watching where you're going.
TRUE STORY: While I was on a road run a couple of months ago, I noticed a young girl driving towards me was swerving quite a bit (I always run facing oncoming traffic for this reason). She was inching further and further onto the shoulder, so I jumped back a few feet into the grass as she drove by. The scary thing is, she didn't even notice that she had made me nervous, because her head was down and her eyes were fastened to her phone. Meanwhile, I almost peed my pants.
So while it's common knowledge that texting while driving is greatly discouraged, I was shocked to find out that text driving is actually more dangerous than drunk driving. Disclaimer: Drunk driving is stupid and dangerous, and in no way am I implying that since it's "better" than text driving, you should go ahead and swerve your way home. Anyway, the study found that people's reaction time was much slower while texting than it was after throwing back a few drinks or even doing drugs. I don't know about you all, but that scares the living daylights out of me. And yes, I just said living daylights.
So, we're texting more, therefore texting more while driving, meaning that there are countless more-dangerous-than-drunk-drivers on the road at any given time. Think about it.
Anyone else have a close call while texting?
About The Author:
I just moved back to The Lou from CoMo and I'd love to hear from you. Shoot me an idea/comment/bored rambling at audrey@toastedrav.com.I am also an expert at the Chicken Dance, and I am willing to give lessons for a small fee.
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But my glass house is full of holes. Apparently someone is throwing my stones back at me
Good article to remind us.
(can't say I don't take direction well)
Also watch for government intervention into making texting while driving (TWD) illegal. Tickets are already being written in some states if you get caught doing it!
However, I am always angered at people who don't use their turn signals. It's not a choice and I believe that anyone who fails to use their signal while texting or talking should receive notice as well.
I very, very rarely talk while driving my 5 speed and it has saved my life on many occasions when other people are to distracted to drive safely. That's my piece.
Turn Signals - Not a choice, a necessity.
What is reCAPTCHA?
reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books.A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You've probably seen them Ñ colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from "bots," or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.
About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.
To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then transformed into text using "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.
reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.
But if a computer can't read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here's how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.
Currently, we are helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive and old editions of the New York Times.